Options are crippling as chronic diseases,
weakening resolve, eating away the marrow of confidence.
What choice to make? What medication to take?

To swallow the pill of regret would be foolish,
To take the injection of shame would be folly.
How to decide which career? What diet? What friend group? Golly!

Don’t offer kisses on New Year, or raise glasses to beginnings.
Terminal, such endings.
Where to go? What to do? Who to be?

2022 slips into 2023,
and uncertainty is slowly killing me.
It’s sickening, sickening, sickening.

Turning old with worry lines, hardly sleeping at night!
What treatment will cure this anxiety?
I’m ill with doubt, it’s swelling my throat, closing up my mouth

Through glasses of bubbly champagne,
and a dysfunctioning brain, I think
God help me, please.

Through a haze of ailment, head heavy with a virus,
a whisper from within cures my fretting sin:
“Just Breathe.”

Who am I going to be?
One breath at a time,
One breath at a time.

In, out.
In, out.
Peace.

Tomorrow will worry about itself, why should I borrow trouble?
Every choice made is tangled with joy and sorrow.
This is who I will be: a person of peace.

Traffic.
Cars, silhouettes against the pavement, chatter in the city streets, buzzing socialization in restaurants and bars, neon lights under autumn atmospheres.
The traffic never stops, only surges
moment by moment fast-forward
till chaos becomes the norm,
and my headspace has built itself an empire
of skyscrapers, stop signs and red lights, faces blurring along the roadside.
And the engines roar
and the engines sputter,
as I take my route to my abode
roommates on planes or driving home for the holiday.
I park my Hyundai up to the front door, key unlocks and suddenly –

Visions outside my window quiet the noise.
Leaves cascading in bronze, gold, silver,
skyline indigo; blinding blue above.
I slumber into the leaves, sinking into the pile.
Maybe it’s ok to stay for a while?
Maybe to break down, to rot,
disintegrate, to simply exist in another way.
Into the earth, into the ground.
Into the roots, into the soils.
Where no one is around.
It’s moments like these I’m grateful for,
Where my headspace falls into place
no traffic
no distractions
just me, and my leaves.